What Are The Gobshites Saying These Days?

Welcome back to our weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue which, as should be obvious by now, is what Stravinsky would have produced, had he written The Rake's Progress Across The Blackboard.

Before moving on to our usual friends from the electric teevee set, we should pause for a moment and consider the greatest thing that happened this weekend. On Saturday night, Manny Pacquiao fought Juan Manuel Marquez in a welterweight title bout in Las Vegas. Because he has very little to do these days except listen to his assets germinate, Willard Romney stopped by and, prior to the fight, visited Pacquiao in the fighter's dressing room, dragging the thick mist of failure and abject loserdom along with him.

And, of course, the inevitable occurred. And it drew a reaction from our hero at ringside that we everlastingly will refer to as The Ohio Face.

And the real hell of it is, the first thing Pacquiao saw when he woke up on the table back in his dressing room was Dick Morris, telling him he was ahead on all three cards and well on his way to winning the fight. At this point, God is just fking with Willard Romney, and it's a beautiful thing to watch.

Which could not be said for the weekly sketch comedies on which the news was discussed. Before getting to the Die-Granny-Die! portion of the proceedings, which were lengthy, and which involved Mary Matalin, which I mention only if you want to lay in about three gallons of Ipecac, we will begin my congratulating not only the Dancin' Master, but also The Clinton Guy Who Was Shocked By Blowjobs, both of whom gave master classes in how to maintain one's busy social calendar by completely ignoring the fact that you've invited lying crazy people to lie crazily on your electric teevee shows. Let us begin with the Dancin' Master, who hosted Rick Santorum on the overtime part of the program, and sat there like a pile of leaves while Santorum, who really is a colossal dick — and have I mentioned recently what a colossal dick this man is? — accused the president of being soft on Sharia law.

But that was seen only by those people who really believe that an hour of the Dancin' Master's bringin' the pain on live TV isn't enough, and those people can't stay at large forever. For some serious nutbag-ignoring, the Clinton Guy took this week's house cup. First, he had on Jeb Hensarling, one of the many Texas congresscritters fairly defined as Not As Crazy As Louie Gohmert and, therefore, a Moderate. Anyway, Jeb was airborne almost instantly.

No Republican wants to vote for a rate tax increase. I mean, what that is going to do, according to the National Federation of Independent Business that commissioned a study by Ernst & Young, is cost 700,000 Americans to go from having paychecks to unemployment checks.

See, now, The Clinton Guy used to work in the White House, and in Democratic campaign, and he knows that the NFIB is little more than a shell for huge corporations, and that it hasn't endorsed a Democratic candidate since god was a boy, and that the study Jeb is citing here has been shredded on a number of different occasions by a number of different people. But, to mention that one of your guests is peddling bligewater for champagne is what gets you empty chairs of a Sunday morning, so he just let it go cascading out to the rest of us. He then moved on to Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma), who can fairly be defined as Not As Crazy As Jim Inhofe and, therefore, a Moderate. Coburn said he would sign on to "tax increases" by closing unspecified loopholes, and The Clinton Guy politely declined to notice that Coburn might as well have recommended selling off the country's entire stockpile of pixie dust to balance the budget. Thus emboldened by his host's good manners, Coburn proceeded to lie his pompadour off about "entitlements."

It doesn't really matter what happens at the end of this year, because ultimately the numbers and the bondholders throughout the world will determine what we'll spend and what we won't. So we can play the political game that is being played out in Washington right now or we can actually be absolutely honest with the American people and say, Medicare is going bankrupt, Social Security bankrupt -- disability would be bankrupt in two years, Social Security trust fund will be bankrupt in five years, Social Security total will be bankrupt in probably 16, 17 years. Those are worst-case scenarios by the trustees of both those organizations. So we can play the game. And that's what we're facilitating this morning. But the fact is, is we're spending money that we don't have on things that we don't absolutely need and there's no grown-ups in Washington that will say, time out, stop the politics, let's have a compromise rather than continue to play the game through the press and hurt the country. We're already going to get another debt downgrade just from what's happening now because nobody in positions of power are willing to do what is important and necessary for our country.

So, apparently, assuming that Senator Coburn is an English-speaking primate, Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare — about which he was lying anyway — represent how "we're spending money we don't have on things we don't absolutely need. (The senator certainly doesn't need them. He has a government-funded, single-payer health-care system on which to fall back.) This is a remarkable admission. Confronted with an argument for the utter abandonment of the social safety net as a money-wasting trifle, the Clinton Guy responded.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator Stabenow, go ahead.

I swear to Christ, Coburn could have shown up wearing an actual bird on his head, and advocating for the immediate execution of everyone on food stamps, and nobody would have said a word.

But, of course, the topic of the weekend, the topic of all our weekends these days, was pain. Who would bring it? How much would there have to be? And, of course, how to explain to the country that granny-starving is a patriotic act that will keep us from becoming Greece. There's no better place for that kind of talk that Dancin' Dave's Disco Dance Party. Surprisingly, some actual Democrats wandered into the studio this week — OK, Dick Durbin, but any old port etc., and god, did I need some old port by the end of this. — and there was some tepid push-back against starving all the grannies all together. The Dancin' Master never got rolling because his show turned quickly into Camp Runamuck. First, though, there was some prevaricatin' to be done from Rep. Kevin McCarthy, noted for taking his marching orders from mediocre Ben Affleck movies, although Allen West, his partner in comedy gold, will not be returning to Congress, which is why people have been seen removing padding from the walls.

It doesn't solve the problem. If the president is asking for higher ratings, he is asking for more revenue. Most economists agree the best way to get that is through closing special loopholes. And, you know what, when you close those, it makes a fair tax process. So people invest on the return, not invest based upon what the IRS says.

"Most economists?" Like, a majority of economists? And even if you don't tell them what loopholes you're closing? I don't care whose car you're taking, pal, I'm wondering if you should be driving at all. Later, of course, we learned that McCarthy was really only in it for the middle-class folks who don't have tax lawyers.

Look, I think if you close special interest tax loopholes, you have a fairer process. Because those who are listening today, they don't have a lobbyist, they don't have some attorney or they don't have some high-priced account or some special interest out there. They want a fair process that they know when they go fill out their tax code others aren't getting a special loophole. That is a more efficient way and a fairer way. And it also makes you invest your money not based on what the IRS says but based upon the economy. And it will grow the economy stronger--more taxpayers, more workers produces more revenue.

And because they don't have lobbyists or tax lawyers, they don't get the carried-interest deductions, or the big old break on investment income, or the capital gains breaks. Is that what McCarthy's talking about, because I'm willing to bet a mint Blu-Ray copy of Gigli that it's not.

Of course, all the talk about the tax code served only to frustrate the Dancin' Master, who was itchin' to deal out the pain. First, though, he had to let McCarthy hijack the show one more time.

SEN. DURBIN: May I respond?

REP. MCCARTHY: The president proposed a plan that you didn't even vote for.

SEN. DURBIN: May I respond?

GREGORY: Go ahead, senator.

REP. MCCARTHY: 97 percent of American businesses are exempt from any tax increase because of the proposal by the president to protect people making less than 250 thousand dollars a year. 98 percent of all Americans are going to be exempt from paying any higher taxes if and only if Speaker Boehner will pass the bill that we sent him in July to protect middle income families.

Wait. Where did the Senator go there? Things got worse later.

REP. MCCARTHY: He is a phone call away. We will come right down to him.

SEN. DURBIN: No, listen.

REP. MCCARTHY: We sent a plan — it took him three weeks to respond.

SEN. DURBIN: The president...

REP. MCCARTHY: He has not responded to our current one.

GREGORY: Let me — let me do this.

REP. MCCARTHY: You can't negotiate with yourself.

Remember the scene where George Clooney is pushing the fishing boat up the front of that massive wave? That's the Dancin' Master here. Luckily, they finally got McCarthy sedated off-stage, and we were treated to The Panel, which included N. Leroy Gingrich, Definer Of Civilization's Rules And Leader (Perhaps) Of The Civilizing Forces, and Bob Woodward, who appears to be made out of mahogany at this point, and who dreads The Cliff more than do mortal men. First, though, Woodward needed to establish order, because some actual human interaction had broken out between Gingrich and MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell over who had said what about the Clinton tax hikes back in 1993.

MR. GINGRICH: When we balanced the — when we balanced the budget, we balanced the budget with a tax cut not a tax — four consecutive balanced budgets with a tax cut, not a tax increase.

MR. O'DONNELL: A tiny tax cut compared to the biggest tax increase in history which is what Bill Clinton did. You didn't dismantle it.

(Cross talk)

MR. BOB WOODWARD: ...to re-litigate the 1990s.

Yes, because it takes a guy who steadily turns out gigantic doorstops full of establishment stenography to remind us that historical parallels are basically worthless because history basically ends and then starts again, like it's got carbureator trouble, and nothing in the past ever teaches us anything worth knowing now. Besides, there is the terror of The Cliff to confront.

But this does real damage to the economy and to millions of people if going over the cliff. This is not an abstraction. You could begin a recession. And Senator Durbin's idea and — and the polls support him that the Republicans will own this recession will last about one month because presidents own recessions, presidents own dramatic improvements in things. We live in the Obama era, not the John Boehner era.

Bob Woodward knows Great Man Theory, by god, and only presidents are Great Men. That wasn't analysis. That was the first sentence of his next book proposal. It should be noted (again) that none of this "real damage" will be done to anyone on this panel, nor will any of the "real damage" that comes from the inevitable bad deal materially affect their lives in any way, unless, of course, Tiffany's calls in Gingrich's marker.

By the way, if you're keeping score at home, according to the official NBC roster of guests, representatives of organized labor on Meet The Press have appeared about as often as candidates from the Free Soil Party.

We shouldn't leave without looking in on Face The Nation, if only to see what former King Canute environmental correspondent Bob Schieffer was up to. He had on half of the great god SimpsonBowles — the corporate bagman half, not the nasty old gumfuzzler half — who pronounced itself satisfied with the way the possible granny-starving was progressing. Then there was a "roundtable" on which either Joe Klein or Norah O'Donnell was The Liberal. Joe took himself out of the running early by having a very large sad that The Heritage Foundation has abandoned its historic mission as The Manhattan Project for bad ideas and is now simply a more obvious political chop-shop because it hired Jim DeMint.

I think it's pretty sad actually. I remember Heritage was where Obamacare originally came from, you know the idea of an individual mandate came from Stewart Butler of the Heritage Foundation. We're at the moment now where there's some interesting thinking is happening among younger conservatives on a lot of the social issues that are bedeviling us like health care.

Norah had a shot but then, alas, fell victim to the Jesus-On-A-Stegosaurus Fallacy.

Well, look at all the — those who are leading the Republican ticket, presumably, for 2016 whether it's Rubio, Ryan, Jeb Bush, all of them acknowledge that the party has got to change to some degree, and especially Rubio and Bush, acknowledging the need to tackle on issues like immigration, to speak to middle class voters. So there is an acknowledgment that they are going to be change. Bobby Jindal as well. I mean, these are people who are forward thinking.

The grappling went on, clumsier and clumsier, and then Joe apparently decided to throw the game completely.

And we all know that the health care system has to be addressed. There are ways to do it. Some of which Paul Ryan suggested. You know, Ryan's plan for Medicare is exactly the same as Obamacare.

Whoa, there, veteran scribe. Even if that were true, which it's not, the critical difference is that the president believes in Medicare and wants it to survive, while Paul Ryan doesn't believe it is a legitimate function of government, never has believed it was a legitimate function of government, and would burn it to the ground tomorrow if he thought he could get away with it. The liberal could not be found this week. The prize will carry over to next week's sweepstakes.

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